Die Patchnotes:

PATCH FEATURES

New Feature: Competitive Play

Once you hit level 25, you’ll have access to our newest feature: Competitive Play. This mode was designed to be a more serious experience, allowing players to hone their skills and perfect their strategies. But before diving into the fray, you’ll need to play 10 placement matches. These will allow our matchmaking system to gather enough information about your abilities to assign a skill rating.

With your newly acquired skill rating, you’ll be matched against players of a similar ability level. And if you play well and win games, the competition will become increasingly fierce throughout the two-and-a-half-month season. Plus, your performance will be rewarded with unique in-game items like sprays, player icons, and Competitive Points (which can be traded in for cosmetic Golden Weapons).

We’ve also made a number of changes to Overwatch’s match format for Competitive Play. Some of these changes are simple interface changes, while others ensure that maps and modes don’t favor one side or another—plus we’ve added a sudden death mechanic that ensures tied games are broken as fairly as possible.

Because Competitive Play is more serious in nature, we want to make sure that player behavior is acceptable. This means that the penalties are more severe than in the Quick Play or Weekly Brawl! modes. Leaving a game early or stepping away from your computer will make you ineligible to join a game until the previous game has ended, and continued infractions could result in restrictions or removal from Competitive Play.

When activating Widowmaker’s Ultimate ability, Infra-Sight, her voice line will now be audible map-wide

“Weapons” section added to the Hero Gallery

Added McCree as an AI hero in Practice vs. AI, Play vs. AI, and Custom Game modes

Added a variety of a social options to the hero selection and end of match screens

Removed “Prefer”/”Avoid” player system

BUG FIXES

General

Fixed a bug that would cause players’ weapons to auto-snap straight up or down when the crosshair was aimed between 85 and 90 degrees

Fixed a bug that caused players who backfilled and then completed a game to sometimes receive a loss on their Career Profile and not receive their XP bonus for backfilling

Fixed a bug that would move players toward the source of a knockback rather than away from it

Fixed a bug that caused Hearthstone-themed sprays to ignore localization

Fixed several framerate issues that could occur when cycling through the hero selection menu

Fixed a variety of issues with and made several improvements to ambient lighting

Made some improvements to how AI heroes respond to one another

Made a variety of performance and optimization improvements across the game

Unicode keys for non-English keyboards are now displayed properly in the keybinding interface

Maps

Players can no longer be resurrected in out-of-play areas on Ilios

Heroes

Fixed a bug with the “Junkrat RIP-Tire Kills—Average” lifetime statistic

Fixed a bug that allowed some projectiles to shoot through Reinhardt’s Barrier Field

Fixed a bug that allowed Torbjörn to pick up Scrap while dead

Overwatch Public Test Region Now Available

A new Overwatch patch is currently in development and now available for testing on the Public Test Region. For information on how to participate and what changes are included in the upcoming patch, read on below.

To participate in the public test, you must have an Overwatch game license for Windows PC attached your Battle.net account in good standing (i.e. it hasn’t been suspended or banned).

Note: In order to access the PTR, you must have installed Overwatch and logged into the game at least once. If the PTR is not available for you after following the steps above, trying logging into Overwatch, exiting the game client, and then launching the PTR again.